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Singapore’s national dish: Hainan chicken rice

For a country of people to claim a national dish implies, first, a prosperity and stability that nourishes the kind of solidarity required for everyone in the land to agree on one single food that stands for all.

Having a national dish also implies modernity, since the concept of nationhood is a relatively contemporary undertaking and one that many states still grapple with. Lastly, having a national dish implies simplicity because such a meal cannot be too expensive or complicated to make, or too fanciful to eat on a regular basis.

All of which is to say that a true national dish is a rare thing. The tastes of large countries are too diverse to love a single dish. Old, established nations, with a few exceptions, are too burdened by formality, history, and tradition to arrive at something as folksy and populist as a national dish.

So it makes sense that a small, young and modern country like Singapore (it achieved full sovereignty in 1965) has a national dish that all its citizens love: Hainan chicken rice. Chicken rice, named for the Chinese province of Hainan it comes from, is eaten everywhere, every day in Singapore. The difference between chicken rice that is mediocre and chicken rice that is superb is not too great; that, too, is the mark of a true national dish, its ability to be good even when it is bad, to survive poor preparation.

Some dishes are emblematic of a nation — escargot in France, apple pie in America, caviar in Russia — but that is not the same thing because they are not everyday foods. Perhaps a good litmus test for a national dish is whether it is served aboard that nationâs airline. If you fly Singapore Airlines you can, in fact, eat Hainan chicken rice.

Chicken rice is a simple dish: poached chicken with a soy-sauce dressing, served with fragrant, oily rice cooked in chicken broth. Cucumber and cilantro are used as garnish. The magic is in the condiments — two sauces used for dipping, one a chili paste, the other a ginger paste.

C.C., who grew up in Malaysia, eats it himself about once a week, and the dish gets ordered at the restaurant regularly if not fanatically. While a restaurant in Malaysia or Singapore can go through 40 or 50 chickens a day, he said, the Satay Hut goes through five or six at the most.

About three-fourths of Singaporeâs 5 million people are ethnic Chinese; Malays and Indians make up most of the other fourth. More than one-third of the countryâs population is foreign-born. The food of Singapore is a variation of Chinese cooking and much of it is eaten informally in hawker stalls, the southeast Asian version of a food court. Singapore is known for its chili crab, braised shark head, stewed bone marrow, and most of all its chicken rice, whose origins are Chinese.

Singaporeans all have their favorite versions of the dish. For as simple as it is, there are many subtle differences in flavor, aroma and texture.

Like many forms of comfort food, chicken rice is loved precisely for its simplicity. When people brag or gush about their local food, it is often something very humble and inexpensive. In Seattle, you donât go on and on to visitors (unless you are pompous or pretentious) about the truffle-scented sunchoke soup at Crush; you croon about the Dickâs Deluxe. And so it goes in other cities. The foods closest to your heart are things like ribs and donuts and greasy sandwiches.

America, it can be argued, is one of those countries without a national dish. Southerners love their barbecue; New Englanders have their lobster rolls; New Yorkers swear by their bagels; We might all love our beef and our pizza and our hot dogs, but even those foods vary by region and tend to be eaten ceremoniously. They are foods we eat at the fair, at a baseball game, or on the Fourth of July.

In Singapore, whether it is a holiday or a just another Monday, the choice is easy, even for a traveling Indonesian, lost in the Northwest.

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A former national correspondent for The Associated Press and Newsday, freelance writer Hugo Kugiya has written about the Northwest for the Puget Sound Business Journal, The Seattle Times, the Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times. His book, 58 Degrees North, about the sinking of the Arctic Rose fishing vessel, was a finalist for the 2006 Washington State Book Award. You can reach him at hugo.kugiya@gmail.com.